Chat moderator guide lines

Recently a new class of moderators was added, the so called chat moderators.
Their job is to monitor the chat while still being a regular player.
They can only mute players, they don't have the ability to jail players like real moderators.

Some general reasons for muting would include:
-Racist comments in chat;
-Spamming;
-(Sexually) harassing someone.

The guidelines for moderating chat are very hard to define. We do list a simple set of offensive or unacceptable categories. However, to what degree they are violated or what communications are offensive is often subjective. Determining what is unacceptable isn't easy, and we will need to rely on the discretion of the chat moderator. Maintaining consistency and fairness among the players and other chat mods is key.

In a nutshell: It is hard to decide what is a mute-worthy, as such we will rely on good judgment.

For clarification:
Harassment would be defined as continuous or repeated abusive comments towards a player, not the occasional name calling for someone being killed etc.

The best thing to do as a chat mod to stay clear of personal insults as much as possible is to avoid public confrontations about mutes as no good can come from them.

Chat moderators should be lenient when it comes to chat filter evasion for commonly used words such as shit, fuck, whore etc. as these don't really insult anyone. They should only mute for harm caused to other players (harassment, racism etc.), not just purely the words themselves.

Players should know that the warning stage does not HAVE to be repeated every time and for obvious misbehaviour such as racist comments is NOT necessary.

Also, just because there's no filter on the yell channel doesn't mean people can say whatever they want in there, this channel should be moderated just like broadcast.

Commands available to chat moderators:

gm warn <PlayerName>
gm mute <PlayerName>
gm unmute <PlayerName>
gm logip <PlayerName>
gm log <Message>

These should be pretty straightforward but here's an example;

Mr Spy has been spamming broadcast with racist comments and is generally being annoying towards other players.

Chat moderators can use the commands above to deal with Mr Spy by doing the following;

gm warn Mr Spy
This will send a warning to Mr Spy.

Now Mr Spy obviously doesn't listen and continues to spam so you will have to mute him.

gm mute Mr Spy
This will mute Mr Spy for 15 minutes.

After muting someone you should log it using the logip and log commands.

gm logip Mr Spy
This will add a log entry containing the Mr Spy's accountname and IP so we can keep track of trouble makers.

gm log Muted Mr Spy for spamming racist comments.
This logs the message you enter, use this after muting someone so we know who got muted and why.

Now, in case Mr Spy decides to log alternate characters and spam on those you can skip the warning step and go straight to muting.

Last edited by Mr Spy (July 12th, 2010 4:02 PM)